Revue: ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ with Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr

Beware of Richard Roma. Top Man among the lower feeders of a real estate agency of Chicago, it has a hypnotic blow and a dizzying Spiel. Identifying your vulnerabilities with medico-legal precision, he will launch them with an blunt needle. (“You think you are weird? “He asks for a brand. all queer. ») If that is what you need, he will be the brother who thinks big on your behalf, who sees beyond your sad safety habit for the awards that only the risk can offer.

Not that there are really rewards. The land he sells in Florida, in developments, is ridiculously called Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms, is worth nothing.

Back to the office too, he is the alpha among the losers. In the recent income ranking, he is closest to the $ 100,000 mark which will win a Cadillac in the agency’s sales competition. (The two lowest employees will be dismissed.) His colleagues are only additional brands to bamboo. They have diagrams; He has juice.

No wonder it remains, 41 years after having struck Broadway for the first time in “Glengarry Glen Ross” by David Mamet, one of the greatest characters in the theater: the unregulated identification of socio -speaking capitalism. He makes Willy Loman look like a Softy. This seller will never die.

Or I thought. But in the strangely boxing renewal which opened its doors on Monday at the Palace Theater, something turned around. As played by Kieran Culkin, leading a sales team that also presents Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr and Michael McKean, Roma is no longer the master of neuroses of all the others; He is neurotic himself. Especially in the scene which ends the first act, while he finds himself for a terrain in the soul of a Schlub, he is so deeply bizarre and interior that everything seeming from a confident exterior evaporates. The man could not sell a dollar for a penny.